Racial supremacy and the Zionist exception

Neo Nazis, Alt-Right, and White Supremacists take part a the night before the 'Unite the Right' rally in Charlottesville, VA, white supremacists march with tiki torchs through the University of Virginia campus. (Photo by Zach D Roberts/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

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Politicians from Senators Marco Rubio and Orrin Hatch to Chuck Schumer and Ron Wyden have been outspoken in their condemnation of Saturday’s Unite the Right March in Charlottesville and the vicious acts of terror it spawned. Criticizing Donald Trump for his reluctant and temporizing comments, they condemn the hate and are rightly appalled by the white supremacist chants of “Blood and Soil” and “You Won’t Replace Us”—or, as it became, “Jews Won’t Replace Us”. Though they have so far fallen as far short as Donald Trump from calling it by its real name, American fascism, they have been forthright in calling out this assembly of virulent racist movements.

Meanwhile, the same senators are united by their ardent support for a racist regime that is no less inspired by racial supremacy and an ideology that demands ethnic cleansing. All have signed on to a bill that would protect the state of Israel by imposing civil and possibly criminal penalties on anyone who protests its ongoing violations of Palestinian rights, including illegal settlement and dispossession, by advocating for the boycott of its economic, academic and cultural institutions. In doing so, they have placed protecting Israel and its racially discriminatory policies above the rights of activists who are inspired by the same commitment to justice as the demonstrators who opposed the open display of racism and anti-Semitism in Charlottesville.

The contradiction between condemning US racism and support for the racist ideology of Zionism has become steadily more glaring. The ugly chants and intimidating violence of the fascist right have met with almost universal disgust, including naming the lethal ramming of non-violent protesters an act of terror. At the same time, Americans have had to confront the fact that white supremacy is an intrinsic if shameful element in their history and institutions whose consequences have yet to be overcome. The brief moment when the premature claim that the United States was “postracial” has run its course. But the same awareness has yet to extend to the remarkably similar and equally consequential world-view of Zionism.

Zionism has always recognized that in order to create and maintain “a Jewish state for a Jewish people” it would have to dominate and displace the native Palestinian population. Early Zionists like Ze’ev Jabotinsky recognized the necessity of ethnic cleansing; more recently, Zionist historians like Benny Morris have acknowledged that Israel could only have been founded on the back of the expulsion of some 750,000 Palestinians. But, as with any settler colony, the fear remains that what Israel calls the “Judaization” of the state and the lands they have illegally occupied remains incomplete. So what is euphemistically called the “transfer” of Palestinians continues, in the Negev, in Galilee, in East Jerusalem and on the West Bank. Meanwhile right-wing Israeli youth rampage through the Palestinian quarter of the Old City chanting the same virulent racist supremacism as American fascists while Israeli police arrest the counter-demonstrators.

In December 2015, protesters from the Israeli right-wing Organisation for Prevention of Assimilation in the Holy Land (LEHAVA) demonstrate outside a Jewish-Muslim wedding. (Photo: AFP)

American white supremacists express their fury at being replaced by an increasingly diverse population and speak of a “demographic genocide”. Although their rage has a long history in American genocide and racial segregation, it is met now with disbelief and widespread antagonism. Meanwhile, the self-proclaimed “Jewish State” of Israel and its officials not only speak openly of the “demographic threat” or “time-bomb” posed by the Palestinian population in Israel and in the territories it illegally occupies, they develop policies to enact their fantasy of an Israel cleansed of all but a tiny minority of Palestinians.

These measures include not only the demolition of Palestinian homes in the Negev or in East Jerusalem, but also laws like the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law, which prohibits Palestinians outside Israel from gaining citizenship, or even permanent or temporary residence, if they marry an Israeli citizen. This law, which denies the basic right to family unification to thousands of Palestinian families, was upheld by Israel’s Supreme Court in 2006 and renewed in 2016. Even at the height of apartheid, the South African Supreme Court balked at accepting a similarly framed law on the grounds that it would have adversely affected African social life. Likewise, a version of redlining, an old American practice that maintained segregated communities, is commonplace in Israel and protected by law. Adalah, the Israeli Human Rights organization, maintains a database of some 50 laws like this that discriminate against Palestinians in Israel, constituting a system tantamount to if not—as some well-informed observers claim—worse than apartheid.

Though some idealist Zionists like Martin Buber once believed in the possibility of sharing a Jewish homeland in Palestine with its indigenous inhabitants, that dream has long been overtaken by the ugly reality of a supremacist state and its system of discrimination and dispossession. It is increasingly difficult and painful for liberal Zionists—to use a pitiful oxymoron—to defend a system that so violates the sense of justice and equality that they elsewhere defend. How can one condemn white racists for fighting to preserve their privileges and supremacy in their “homeland” while defending the right of Israel to maintain a regime based on exactly those values?

Rabbi Matt Rosenberg had no response when leading fascist Richard Spencer asked him “Do you really want radical inclusion into the State of Israel?” If he was left speechless, it is because there really is no response: Israel’s racist regime is based on no less supremacist, no less racist ideas and demands than America’s fascists espouse. It is the practical outcome of the ideology of Zionism and its practices of discrimination and dispossession have historically been furthered just as much by the Labor Party beloved of liberal Zionists as they now are by the currently governing Likud. And from the long-standing courting of right-wing and anti-Semitic US evangelists to the Zionist Organization of America’s support for alt-right publisher and financier Stephen Bannon, the affinities run deep between Zionism and the American right.

Ron Wyden and other progressive Democrats may be writhing in the contortions it takes to do the bidding of Israel and its Zionist lobbyists while claiming to defend civil liberties and social justice at home. It is hardly surprising. The two are fundamentally incompatible. Zionism has become a toxic stain that contaminates whatever comes in contact with it. It turns liberal media, journalists and academics into the mouthpieces of repression and censorship; it spawns defamation and blacklists of scholars and activists in the name of anti-racism; it dons the mantle of democracy and liberalism to promote a supremacist ideology and a racial state. But it remains what it is: a racist ideology with all-too-marked affinities with the white fascism that most of its supporters hasten to condemn.

It is time for consistency and to end the exception made for Zionist racial supremacy. In solidarity with those who protested fascism in Charlottesville, and with those who continue to protest police killings, deportations, Islamophobic travel bans, and homophobic laws, progressives across the board must condemn Zionism and cease to offer uncritical support of the state of Israel. Instead, they should stand with the activists who demand justice for Palestinians even as they protest racism in the US. It is no longer possible to serve the agenda of supremacism in one place and decry it at home. As progressive senators and an increasing number of former liberal Zionists have learnt, the contradictions of doing so are unbearable and the political costs are insidious.

About David Lloyd

David Lloyd is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, and a founding member of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.

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32 Responses

Yup. I didn’t realize that Zionism was Jew-Supremacism until I witnessed the rise of Trump’s white supremacism. Also the alt-right has been severely discredited by Trump’s waffling (not to mention harsh universal condemnation), and as a result diaspora Jews will feel safer in the US and thus won’t feel the need for a ‘backup country’. This will encourage a fresh look at Zionism. “What hath we wrought??” I’m in Jerusalem now and I know we have a huge mess to clean up. I’m happy to help haha.

Also I’m a ‘libertarian zionist’ – one state with full freedom of speech, religion and press.

Then Secretary of State for India and the British cabinet’s only Jewish member, Lord Edwin Montagu’s response to Prime Minister Lloyd George following issuance of the illegal 1917 Balfour Declaration: “All my life I have been trying to get out of the ghetto. You want to force me back there.”

Henry Morgenthau Sr., renowned Jewish American and former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey, 1919: “Zionism is the most stupendous fallacy in Jewish history….The very fervour of my feeling for the oppressed of every race and every land, especially for the Jews, those of my own blood and faith, to whom I am bound by every tender tie, impels me to fight with all the greater force against this scheme, which my intelligence tells me can only lead them deeper into the mire of the past, while it professes to be leading them to the heights. Zionism is… a retrogression into the blackest error, and not progress toward the light.” (Quoted by Frank Epp, Whose Land is Palestine?, p. 261)

Asked to sign a petition supporting settlement of Jews in Palestine, Sigmund Freud declined: “I cannot…I do not think that Palestine could ever become a Jewish state….It would have seemed more sensible to me to establish a Jewish homeland on a less historically-burdened land….I can raise no sympathy at all for the misdirected piety which transforms a piece of a Herodian wall into a national relic, thereby offending the feelings of the natives.” (Letter to Dr. Chaim Koffler Keren HaYassod, Vienna: 2/26/30)

Albert Einstein, 1939: “There could be no greater calamity than a permanent discord between us and the Arab people…. Let us recall that in former times no people lived in greater friendship with us than the ancestors of these Arabs.”

Lessing J. Rosenwald, president of the American Council for Judaism, 1944: “The concept of a racial state – the Hitlerian concept- is repugnant to the civilized world, as witness the fearful global war in which we are involved. . . , I urge that we do nothing to set us back on the road to the past. To project at this time the creation of a Jewish state or commonwealth is to launch a singular innovation in world affairs which might well have incalculable consequences.”

As an historian I have some qualms about the destruction of historical monuments, but Confederate memorials in the US South served an ideological program of romanticizing slavery and denying civil rights to black Americans.

As far as I know, no one is demanding the restoration of the George III statue in Bowling Green.

Below is a link to some ACLU footage on twitter. The point is that this was a violent confrontation which was allowed to transpire for some time by the police who probably could have prevented much of the violence. I still believe that potentially violent street confrontations between the Left and the Right are being encouraged. Divide and rule.
ACLU Virginia link: https://twitter.com/ACLUVA/status/896386562484731904

Yes, for as long as I have lived (and it is depressing to realise how long that has been, though I have every intention of making it much longer) it has been obvious that Americans are crazy, yes. But recently they seem to have got worse.

Annie , if you check out Anderson cooper and his gang of zio apologists , they are running that video.I do not have a link.

I only get CNN so am restricted to that for US news.It is very frustrating watching Blitzer/Gloria Borger and the other Israel apologists waffling on about white supremacists (I carry no brief for them) shouting antisemitic slurs , when they support the same actions carried out by Jewish supremacists in Israel and Palestine.

It is notable that not once do these hypocrites refer to Islamophobia .

thanks wayfare. unfortunately it requires a login to prove i am over 18 or something. i forgot whatever password i signed up with and no longer have access to my old email .. so i can’t watch it on youtube. maybe i will try to find it on vice.

That is why Netanyahu remains silent over the rise in racism & antisemitism in the US.
1. Like the pre-1948 Zionists, who fomented antisemitism around the world & coerced Jews to migrate there, Israel thrives on antisemitism as that is virtually the only way to get Jews to migrate there, and those who do migrate are so disgusted they can hardly wait to get out, as Ronit Dison’s article yesterday on Mondoweiss shows
2. “Israel is one of the most racist societies in the western world” – Shlomo Sand.

Excellent in-depth opinion piece by Gideon Levy today on aljazeera.com regarding the so-called only democracy in the ME. The ashkinazi-convert-jews illegally occupying Palestine are eating themselves from the inside out.

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